A new president is about to take office. The economy is spiraling into a meltdown. The Israelis and Palestinians are descending into war.

But the nation's bloggers can't seem to get enough of one topic: Bernie Madoff.

The Wall Street investor allegedly pulled off one of the biggest frauds in history, persuading many of the nation's rich and powerful to invest in a multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme. Several prominent New Jerseyans, including Sen. Frank Lautenberg and state Sen. Loretta Weinberg, were among Madoff's alleged victims.

As the year ends, bloggers continue to be fascinated by the Madoff case and what it says about American society in 2008. Entire blogs have sprung up focused solely on Madoff and his victims.

Some bloggers are fascinated with how Madoff could have pulled off such an elaborate fraud based on solely image and trust. Other writers have picked up on the rash of anti-Semitism that has emerged in response to the story of the Jewish financial advisor and his mostly-Jewish investors.

But bloggers have been most intrigued by the intense schadenfreude-- the German word for taking pleasure in the misery of others-- that many are grappling with as Madoff's wealthy victims find themselves ending the year as broke as the rest of the country.

Schadenfreude is not a very healthy emotion, so I try to keep my distance from it as best as I can. Yet the temptation to give in while reading the slew of articles covering the scandal concerning Nasdaq chairman Bernie Madoff over the weekend was just too overwhelming . . .

I must confess to some serious gloating over anecdotes from Madoff's country club chums in Palm Beach. They now bother to ask about prices of items on the menu or on the golf course services list. The poor souls even have to make do with Lexus cars, when just two months ago they were nonchalantly driving around in Bentleys. Nonetheless, I genuinely feel sorry for the charities and non-profits that will have to curtail their good works or even close shop because their endowments have been all but wiped out.

First, full disclosure: Bernard Madoff is in my extended family, and many in my family were victimized by his fraud. While I've shared close airspace with Bernie less than 10 times in my life, I've grown up knowing other headline-making Madoffs, and have always found them to be people of virtue and integrity.

But this post isn't about Bernie Madoff, the figurehead of immorality; this is about Bernie Madoff, the lightning rod of anti-Semitism . . .

The stirring of widespread latent anti-Semitism must feel frighteningly familiar to those who lived in Europe during the 1930s. And it should be just as alarming to us as well. While deleting waves of anti-Semitic rants from comment forums is a rational move, it also sweeps them under the rug.

"The Bradley Effect", while a dispelled myth, made us look deeper into the dark corners of American culture. What will "The Madoff Effect" have? Will it cause us to recognize and fight a broader existence of anti-Semitism, or will it just feed a growing prejudice? Only our national character hangs in the balance.

Frankly, I don't see Madoff as an occasion for anti-Semitism . . . Rather it offers a critique of greed-- both Madoff's and many of those who profited from his scam-- until the floor collapsed. I go with those who see Madoff as an expose of our money-making systems of late.

It's not just rich people (read "greedy people" if you want, or those Jesus thought had particular difficulties entering heaven) who got hurt by Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The estimated $50 billion losses have also devastated many good nonprofits and their beneficiaries: hospitals, daycares, synagogues, and two of the nonprofits I respect the most-- the Innocence Project and Physicians for Human Rights.

The latter lost 29 percent of its funding for their brilliant campaign to expose torture by our government . . .

So one lesson for all those nonprofits that are mad about Madoff is that our own good schemes cannot survive criminality and unaccountability in the financial system: we can't just work on our own good cause, we have to promote accountable government. If the financial system doesn't work we all go down.

Regardless of Bernie's final disposition, the Madoff scandal has highlighted a pretty impressive trend in Wall Street: it's becoming increasingly apparent that numerous financial players, from investors to managers to CEOs, have been playing the market like there's no tomorrow . . .

Even under the best of circumstances, schadenfreude is hardly a healthy emotion. In the current situation, however, there is a certain grim satisfaction in extending a hand to J. Ezra Merkin, Fred Wilpon, Norman Braman, Yeshiva University, and Madoff's other burned investors as they enter the economic wasteland that they formerly disdained.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the jungle.

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